Current weather

John Stossel

People argue about whether the “consensus” of scientists is that we face disaster because of global warming. Instead of debating whether man’s greenhouse gasses will raise temperatures, we should argue about how we gauge disasters.

If you take most environmentalists and climate scientists at their word, the Earth heated up about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, not much more than it heated up the century before that. Warming may increase, but no one can be certain of that.

Newspapers and websites all over America tell their readers that Dallas is favored by 3 points. That’s the “spread” posted by bookies. Millions will be bet on that game, and billions will be bet on other games this weekend — college football, NBA games, NHL matches, UFC events ... .

When it was written, Ben Franklin said the founders gave us a republic, “if you can keep it.” Few people thought the republic would last another 227 years, but it has. The Constitution’s limits on government power helped create the most free and prosperous country on earth.

But now, some Americans, right and left, give up on the Constitution whenever it gets in the way of policies they like. Some on the right defend anti-obscenity laws or want more mingling of church and state, while those on the left want endless economic regulation.

Americans now face beheadings, gang warfare, Ebola, ISIS and a new war in Syria. It’s natural to assume that the world has gotten more dangerous. But it hasn’t.

People believe that crime has gotten worse. But over the past two decades, murder and robbery in the United States are down by more than half, and rape by a third, even as complaints about “rape culture” grow louder.

Terrorism is a threat. But deaths from war are a fraction of what they were half a century ago, when we fought World War II and the Korean War, and Chairman Mao murdered millions.

If I drive across a U.S. border, I expect to stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint. But imagine driving to the grocery store, or Mom’s house, well inside America, and being stopped by the Border Patrol.

Many Americans don’t have to imagine it. Even as the federal government fails to control the southern border, it sends the Border Patrol farther into the interior, where Americans complain that agents harass people who are already U.S. citizens.

“Tea party members don’t think there’s a federal role in transportation!” complained Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, recently, near the site of a $5.8 million highway project.

If only most tea party members were that radical.

While Brown and other big-government folks worry that Republicans will cut spending, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Tuesday added another $10.8 billion to the Highway Trust Fund to keep it going another year — without deciding how to reform it.

Ray Kurzweil — inventor of things like machines that turn text into speech — has popularized the idea that we are rapidly approaching “the singularity,” the point at which machines not only think for themselves but develop intellectually faster than we do.

At that point, maybe we no longer talk about “human history.” It will be “machine progress,” with us along for the ride — if machines keep us around. Maybe they’ll keep us in a zoo, like we do with our monkey ancestors.

It’s hard not to be. If you watch the news, you mostly see violence, disasters, danger. Some in my business call it “fear porn” or “pessimism porn.” People like the stuff; it makes them feel alive and informed.

Of course, it’s our job to tell you about problems. If a plane crashes — or disappears — that’s news. The fact that millions of planes arrive safely is a miracle, but it’s not news.

When Barack Obama ran for president, he promised to clean house, saying, “I’m not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it’s there. There are some that don’t work.”

I cheered when I heard that! But politicians always say they’ll get rid of waste. Then, once in power, they spend more. Obama sure has.